The story of the development of a sound, static method for worst-case execution-time analysis: Real Time Spent on Real Time.

THE GENERAL SETTING for worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis is that a set of hard real-time tasks is to be executed on a given hardware platform. Hard real-time tasks have associated deadlines within which they must finish their execution. The deadlines may be given by periods. Timing verification must verify these timing constraints are satisfied. Traditionally, timing verification is split into a WCET analysis, which determines upper bounds on the execution times of all tasks, and a schedulability analysis, which takes these upper bounds and attempts to verify the given set of tasks when executed on the given platform will all respect their deadlines. The problem to determine upper (and potentially also) lower bounds on execution times underwent a transition in the 1990s: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]